The Cinematheque

“A filmmaker of … brilliantly intimidating films. Unafraid, even eager, to cause discomfort, Breillat has dedicated her career to the cinematic excavation of taboo subjects and liberating female desire onscreen.”

Caitlin Quinlan, MUBI Notebook

Few filmmakers have explored the subject of female sexuality with more seriousness—or pushed the boundaries of sexual representation in the arthouse with more audacity—than Catherine Breillat, self-appointed ​“pariah of French cinema.” Hers is a cinema of truth by way of transgression, of taboos broken not for sensationalist shock value, but an unyielding determination to carry her ideas through to their furthest conclusions. That her artistic project, a patently feminist and polemical one, deliberately deals with facets of womanhood concealed or deemed vulgar by polite (i.e. patriarchal) society helps account for why Breillat has courted such heated controversy—and, in some corners, outright contempt. ​“All true artists are hated,” she has asserted. ​“Only the conformists are ever adored.”

Before there was Breillat, provocateur of the screen, there was Breillat, provocateur of the letter. A true enfant terrible, at 17 her inflammatory 1969 debut novel L’homme facile (A Man for the Asking) scandalized the book world and was banned for readers under 18 in France. It would be the first in a career-long fisticuff with censorship. Her segue into film, a passion ignited by Bergman and Buñuel, began with a bit role in Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972), whose envelope-pushing improprieties, and attending cause célèbre, offered a blueprint for the sort of uncompromising cinema Breillat was determined, if not seemingly destined, to make.

The transition from author to auteur wouldn’t come easy. Her 1976 directorial debut A Real Young Girl, a sexually explicit coming-of-ager adapted from her third novel, fell prey to a newly imposed tax on adult-classified pictures, persuading the producer to suspend its release. (It wouldn’t see the light of day until 1999’s Romance stirred interest in the Breillat back catalogue.) Her follow-up Nocturnal Uproar (1979), the public’s first taste of the incendiary writer as cineaste, took a critical and commercial drubbing at home and resulted in a nine-year absence from moviemaking for the confidence-rattled director.

Though ripples and international inroads were made with her subsequent work (1988’s 36 fillette played NYFF, for instance), it wasn’t until sixth feature Romance that the artist went from domestic agitator to global menace. The censorship row over the film’s unprecedented explicitness, exacerbated by the casting of Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi and rumours (later confirmed) of unsimulated sex, triggered widespread debate on the definition of ​“pornography” and raised the hackles of some feminist groups who also took umbrage with its portrayal of a sadomasochistic screen heroine. As intellectually exacting as it is unabashedly graphic, Romance positioned Breillat at the frontline of a so-called ​“New French Extremity” movement and in the pedigree of principled transgressors like de Sade, Bataille, and Pasolini. Her ensuing films, including masterpiece Fat Girl (2001), depravity study Anatomy of Hell (2004), and festival darling The Last Mistress (2007), would be measured, for better or worse, against the revelatory daring of that breakthrough work.

This summer, thicken your skin and leave your scruples at the door as The Cinematheque presents a near-comprehensive retrospective of the formidable French auteur’s cycle of feature films. Occasioned by the theatrical release of Last Summer (2023), Breillat’s first picture in a decade, ​“All True Artists Are Hated” surveys nearly fifty years of feather ruffling by the doyenne of deviant female desire, including new restorations, as well as 35mm presentations, of rarely screened works.

“The bad girl intellectual of French cinema.”

Amy Taubin, Village Voice

“The high priestess of errant female sexuality.”

Beatrice Loayza, Film Comment

“The most uncompromising French filmmaker of her generation.”

Benjamin Secher, The Telegraph